SPIKE
I wish that I could push a button
Texturally and thematically, King of America was a one-shot for Costello; true to form, he appeared again just eight months later with a noisy, high-tech song cycle, Blood and Chocolate, produced by old crony Nick Lowe. It sounded like a forgotten Kinks or Hollies record, or maybe just the Great Lost Costello Album. Costello was back writing pop songs with his old vicious charm, and it was probably this unshakable quality that denied him a hit single yet again. Unlike a lot of important rock artists, Costello has never been coy about his lack of Top 40 success: it frustrates the hell out of him. In an amusing symbol of his plea for universal recognition, he put the credits of Blood and Chocolate in Esperanto; the world didn’t respond.
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An unusual–unprecedented, actually–hiatus followed. Besides a scintillating British-only compilation of B-sides, Out of Our Idiot, Costello released nothing in 1987 or ’88; the only news was that he was writing songs with Paul McCartney. Now we have Spike, his first record in two years, his first confessing to anything but the most marginal assistance in composition, and his first for Warner Bros. records. (Columbia, his previous label, apparently never recovered from his temporary, it turned out, name change.) Spike, one finds, is an exercise in songwriting prowess. It gives us a political polemic (“Tramp the Dirt Down”) and a Browningian monologue (“God’s Comic”); a simple, aching lost-love song (“Baby Plays Around”) and just as beautiful a ballad about a quite different kind of love (“Satellite”); a charming profile of a witch who terrorizes children (“Miss Macbeth”) and another of a lovably insane nursing-home resident (“Veronica”); and lots more. Spike’s sprawling, if somehow still elegant, diversity is the album’s message, ultimately: there comes a time when all you can do is practice your craft, keep doing the thing you fought so hard to earn the right to do. Costello’s psyche has burned so fiercely over the last 10 or 12 years that his moments of catharsis have had a scary clarity–think of “Radio Radio,” or “Man Out of Time.” King of America and its urgent follow-up, taken together, were another, more final catharsis. Spike is the first we’ve seen of a new Elvis Costello, ready to practice what he’s preached.
“. . . This Town . . . ,” the album’s opener, begins with a churning overture, then smashes into a warped, 1980s version of “Penny Lane,” with the banker and barber replaced by thuggish, small-time entrepreneurs. It has a strong hook, and it leads off the album with a bang, but it’s an unlikely single (and indeed, Warner hasn’t yet released a 45 from the album). Another strong song is “God’s Comic,” which begins with the “I wish you’d known me when I was alive” line. The title and certain parts of the song are obvious homages to Randy Newman’s “God’s Song,” from Sail Away, in which God delights in mankind’s fecklessness and blind rituals of faith. Costello’s version is an ornate tour de force, in which he plays off his own 1986 “death,” Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” the approach of Armageddon, and finally even the ambiguous grammar of the title.
Which is fine and laudable; but a lot of people do that. Costello has finally come face-to-face with the demon of rock ‘n’ roll. Others have met him too. “So come on, you punks, stay young and stay high / Just give me my checkbook, and I’ll crawl off and die,” sang Peter Townshend, presciently, in 1976. The punks were his final subject: they fired up his muse one last time before he became irrelevant. (They had a similar effect on Neil Young, in Rust Never Sleeps, a few years later.) Costello saw the signs back in King of America: “I thought I heard ‘The Workingman’s Blues’ / I went to work last night and wasted my breath.” Finally, in exasperation, he sang to himself:
It’s a terrible request, of course–an impossible one. So he keeps breathing, and writing songs about funny townspeople, and cute old insane women, and the “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror.” Fine stuff, on the whole, but it’s not about changing the world, or changing rock ‘n’ roll, or even about an anger at anything at all that just boils up inside you. That’s what Costello used to do, and today other people do it–people like the members of Public Enemy, or Billy Bragg, or Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, or Michelle Shocked, or even crazy Bono or Tracy Chapman. Together, they all represent the future of rock music. Elvis Costello doesn’t anymore.
